Controlling Comment Spam on your Blog

As soon as your blog begins to attract traffic, as sure as night follows day, it will attract comment spam.

Why?

Because blogs are a rich target! Anyone can post comments and links to the site, blogs rank well in search and people click the links on them all the time.

What is Comment Spam?

It’s where a comment is posted for the express purpose of gaining a valuable link and directing some traffic to an unrelated site.

How is it done?

At a simple level, individuals carry out a search on a topic, find your site and post a comment and link to theirs. These can be quite hard to detect, as the comment can seem relevant, so often only by clicking on the link will you find out it’s spam. There are also spam “robots” which simply find sites and post rubbish and a link – these are easy to spot.

What’s the Scale of This?

It’s huge! Mike’s Life is only four months old, but in the last 72 days my spam blocker has rejected almost 12,000 spam messages! That’s over 160 a day – even if it only took me 10 seconds to remove each comment, that’s a full week’s work I would have done in that time.

What’s the Solution?

Fortunately the solution is simple. Get yourself a spam filter – there are several on the market, most available for all types of blog. The one is use is:

Mollom

And it’s free! Mollom is nothing short of brilliant – it simply does it’s job, without any intrusion.

*shakes head* It's really disgusting how badly the automated spammers hit bloggers. My personal blog (which isn't high traffic) gets quite a bit of spam. The blogs that I actually focus on? I can't even begin to complain about them. It obviously has to be successful with how persistent they are at tracking down commenting sections of blogs.

Hello Mike,
I have not heard of Mollom until now. I do have a spam catcher on my blog that seems to keep most of it down. I do not dare look at the numbers, that would just make me mad.

I watch my incoming search terms and many times can see the search query is that of a 'link builder'. If they have just used a tool to find targeted blogs and do write a comment that is of value, then I may publish it. What I find most times is that they just copy a sentence of your post, write something like "I agree", then leave keywords as their name. ARGH!

I do have moderated comments on my blog. I find it easier to catch them before published then to hunt all the garbage down later and delete.

If these people would use their time to actually do something productive they might be surprised at how far they got.

I'm happy to have installed Akismet right from the start. How more my blog is rising, the more comment spam I receive. This spamfilter is very accurate and not very often he defines the good comments as spam, but this is better than the other way around anyway.

When will these spam morons understand that in most cases the blog comments are 'no follow' and that it has much more impact to success if you just genuine interested in adding value and commenting accordingly? Don't they understand that the sites they are (trying to)link to are hated by everybody right from the start?

However, I think it's commonsense here what separates the man from the boy, the woman from the girl, or if you like it better this way: the good ones from the bad ones.

"Mike's Life is where you can stay current with the life, thoughts, successes and failures of Mike Cliffe-Jones. Never knowingly ordinary, Mike shares as much as possible about his work as a marketer and in business, as well as his enviable lifestyle on and in the oceans around The Canary Islands."